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Viability of Investment in Onion Routing
__TOC__The prospect of a business investing resources into onion routing may initially seem far-fetched, as it is a freely available technology to the market. However, under further examination it is clear that this new technology is undoubtedly worth a company’s efforts. 'Save the Implementing Company Money' First and foremost Onion Routing is a relatively inexpensive way for a company to provide an added layer of protection, both from malicious users and competitors. Through service hiding it can provide protection from denial of service attacks by masking a company’s servers’ addresses as that of an onion node. Furthermore, service hiding can allow web servers, email servers, etc, to be placed behind a corporate firewall, providing an extra layer of security from attacks. These hidden servers run off of the .onion top level domain, this domain is used exclusively to reach nodes connected to an onion network. No special technology is required to access these sites, and there are currently sites available that cross from the web (.com) to the anonymous onion network (.onion) allowing for a user to enter in a .onion web address and connect to the site and conduct business as they always would, but without knowledge of the true location of the server. With the average denial of service attack costing a company $25,000 dollars, it is easy to see how the addition of several servers to implement this technology can easily pay off. The core competency of onion routing is its online anonymity, something critically important for protection from competitors. It isn’t out of the question to imagine that a rival company would monitor a competitor’s web traffic to any number of other companies, giving the competitor the ability to build a client list, look for potential mergers or economic problems, or predict the release of a new product. By implementing onion routing there is no way for a rival business to view the destination of web traffic leaving a corporate network, potentially giving the company that has implemented onion routing a competitive advantage of secrecy. 'Generate Profit Through Consulting Services' As it has been shown, onion routing is something every company can financially benefit from implementing themselves, but unfortunately many don’t have the resources or don’t fully understand its implications. Onion routing can also be used to generate profit, while still being a free software suite, through consulting services to these companies. It is infeasible to be a service provider for onion nodes , as this completely destroys the purpose of anonymity, but to consult companies in its implementation could potentially be extremely profitable. With the investment of several extra consultants an entire new field could be opened, as no companies currently provide these consulting services. Furthermore, the building and implementation of onion nodes at the corporate network border could further increase profits. The additional hardware is a service companies would purchase, as the closer the node is to the network border, the fewer hops it is exposed in an unencrypted form, and thus the more secure it is. 'Business Challenges Faced by Onion Routing' Any company wishing to invest in a new technology such as this must first carefully consider the positives and the negatives before offering capital towards a venture. The field of online anonymity is a relatively new market, with no real leaders in it yet, allowing any company that ventured in the potential for great profit. However, it must be examined why no companies have yet capitalized on the field. The answer it seems is that it is difficult to make a large profit, as the software is free, and being a sole service provider defeats the purpose of anonymity. Therefore as has been stated before, any company wishing to enter this field is relegated to providing hardware or consulting services. However, as has also been previously mentioned, this technology is more of a way to further protect businesses and save them money rather than bring them in additional profit. Currently there are no competitors in the market of online anonymity, but that is not to say that the market would remain that way once a company proves it Is a profitable venture. Initially the main competitors for any firm would like be tier 1 and 2 isp’s may coerce together to form a multiple company hosted anonymity network, absolving any of total control and knowledge of the network, but still allowing them to charge for a quick and secure connection. The largest onion network currently in existence today is TOR, which hosts roughly 1000 routing nodes. A further challenge is building up the network to accommodate large volumes of corporate traffic, and making it sufficiently large enough to be easily accessible by corporations all over the world. A positive side to this though is that as the onion network grows larger, it grows more secure inherently, as it is less likely that a complete set of nodes is compromised as messages traverse it. Finally, if the volume of onion routing traffic increases drastically, the current onion nodes would likely need to be upgraded, as decoding public key encryption is a highly time consuming task. Onion Nodes also have some inherent weaknesses to DOS attacks, so more advanced software and testing algorithms would also need to be emplaced to ensure reliability of the network. Category:Business